“In the matter before this court, on the charge of murder in the second degree, we the jury find the defendant, Cole Wright… guilty.”

There are no shouts, but there’s a visceral reaction. We all just about jump out of our seats. I spin around and catch Ron’s eye. He nods. I know he’s thinking of Garrett. I am too.

The judge asks Tess Hardy if she wants the jury polled.

She does.

The word guilty hums through my brain twelve more times but all that registers is that this is the moment I’ve been waiting for, hoping for, for the past nine months.

Cole Wright has been found guilty.

Except I no longer think he is.

CHAPTER
131

Kingston, New Hampshire

I return to my hotel room in a daze. My phone vibrates with a text: Check email.

I power up my laptop and go to my inbox and there it is, a huge file ready for download. Daryna! I click on the file folder from Ukraine.

Daryna doesn’t mess around. My screen erupts; windows open so rapidly that they overlap one another. Dozens of them.

The first thing I notice are posts from Doc Cams; some I’ve seen, some I haven’t. Dr. Graham was worming his way into the operation, pretending to be one of them until he could blow the whole thing up.

Next I see a pageful of posts from the anti-Wright blog, posts that Daryna has identified as being written by Rachel Bernstein. Some of them are from the past few days. She’s still stoking the fires against the Wrights from Berlin. I wonder if she’s the one who arranged the anti-Cole demonstrators at the courthouse.

It looks like Daryna also found restricted police and FBI files. Could these be the case files documenting the investigation into Suzanne’s disappearance?

The files the lawyers said were missing?

The files that somebody in the federal government requisitioned—because they might have implicated somebody other than Cole Wright?

I enlarge another window and see two prison-intake photos from the correctional center in Cranston, Rhode Island, both head-and-shoulder shots of men in orange jumpsuits. One is John DeMarco, and I recognize the name right away. He’s the inmate Garrett talked to who tipped us off to the grave location. The other guy is Anthony Romero.

Jesus! Is this the Tony Romero who was Suzanne’s old boyfriend? The one who Teresa says was the father of Suzanne’s baby? The one who beat up Garrett and had him chased?

Daryna’s files prove that DeMarco and Romero did time together in Cranston, and now I have a pretty good idea where DeMarco got his information about the location of Suzanne’s grave. He got it from Tony Romero.